From November 10 to November 24, 1902, a four-member subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Territories, led by Indiana Republican Albert J. Beveridge, investigated the fitness of Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma for statehood. This thesis focuses on the brief hearings conducted in four Arizona towns--Prescott, Phoenix, Tucson, and Bisbee. The hearings provided a wealth of information about the economic, social, and political character of Arizona Territory at the turn of the century. Over 300 annotations illuminate the people, places, events, and industries mentioned in the hearings. Sectionalism, party politics, and personal biases influenced the type of evidence collected. The investigation and resultant document (Senate Document 36, 57 Congress, 2 Session, Serial 4420) generated a political tempest which delayed admission for a decade.

This project is an investigation into the role of wild game in the subsistence modes of the miners of the 1867 Wyoming Gold Rush. It is a preliminary step toward understanding both the dynamics of food procurement during the settlement of the American West and the place of those dynamics in a larger model of the history of American relations to and use of natural resources. Three faunal assemblages from different locales within the historic gold-mining town of South Pass City, Wyoming are analyzed and compared in terms of the presence and use of wild and domestic taxa. Historical sources are assessed for evidence of game procurement and perceptions of natural resources. Although the studied assemblages do not empirically represent the wild game depletion suggested by documentary sources, they do reflect cultural preferences of the time, and may represent a situation of depletion and ultimately a shift in utilized game resources.

Wounded Knee has been the site of two significant encounters between the United States and the Sioux nation: the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1891, and the takeover of Wounded Knee Village in 1973. These encounters are related to each other by more than location: both were the result of Sioux participation in a national movement. In the 1880s, that movement was the Ghost Dance, though Sioux involvement was characterized by a uniquely hostile approach. A century later, the Sioux of Pine Ridge reservation formed an alliance with the national American Indian Movement that resulted in a seventy-one day armed siege at Wounded Knee. During both time periods, similar historical factors, external forces, and internal conflicts resulted in the Sioux taking part in these movements, but the unique character of their resistance was shaped by internalized values and a cultural model which favored an aggressive response to perceived threats.

The development of nylon represented a triumph of ten years of experimentation conducted by the DuPont Company in the 1920s and 1930s. For the first dozen years of its existence, nylon was produced exclusively by DuPont, but that changed in 1951 when the company, under anti-trust pressure, negotiated a contract to license the Chemstrand Corporation to manufacture nylon yarn. Two years later, Chemstrand, a joint business venture of the Monsanto Chemical Company and American Viscose, produced its first 20,000 pounds of nylon textile yarn at its Pensacola Plant. This plant had the capacity to convert simple raw materials derived from petroleum into nylon yarn, a viable product with great market potential. / The primary purpose of this dissertation is to record highlights of the Chemstrand/Monsanto Pensacola plant's four decades of operation focusing on the principles and philosophy which brought the plant to its current status. / Included in the research are topics pertaining to the research and development of nylon, the formation of the Chemstrand Corporation, growth of the plant site, on site Research and Development, end products produced from Pensacola fibers and chemicals, health, safety, and environmental issues, and business/community relations. / The research is intended to provide a concise, synthesized study that will serve as a case study for future projects analyzing the development of post World War II business in the South. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-09, Section: A, page: 3346. / Major Professor: William Rogers. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

Located approximately fourteen miles south of Tallahassee, in Wakulla County, Wakulla Springs is a 2,860 acre preserve with a long history as a resort. The centerpiece of the park is the Wakulla Spring, a first magnitude spring which produces 183 million gallons of water a day and creates the Wakulla River. / Wakulla Springs has known visitors for centuries. Indians camped at the site from the Paleoindian period (15,000-8,000 B.C.) through the Spanish conquest (AD. 1539). During Florida's territorial era, the spring became a popular spot for picnics and parties. Though several schemes for development were proposed, the lack of capital and Wakulla's isolation prevented successful commercialization of the site until it was purchased by Florida business tycoon Edward Ball in the 1930s. Ball turned Wakulla Springs into a tourist attraction, complete with a hotel, glassbottom boats, and a swimming beach. While Ball also emphasized the preservation of wildlife, his efforts met with opposition from local environmentalists, who engaged him in a lengthy court battle over his fence on the Wakulla River. Following Ball's death, the resort was purchased by the state of Florida, and is now officially titled the Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park. / This dissertation explores the history of Wakulla Springs from the Pleistocene era to the state's purchase of the park in 1986. It also examines the scientific expeditions to Wakulla Springs, Wakulla's role in literature, and the resort's development as a tourist attraction. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-11, Section: A, page: 3880. / Major Professor: William Warren Rogers. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 24-11, page: 4667. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1963.

Reinventing Long Beach| The fight for space and place in post -Cold War Long Beach, 1990-1999

<p>During the First World War, approximately two million troops served with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), the army that functioned as the material and symbolic focal point of America's commitment to the defeat of the Central Powers. This dissertation examines the impact of training, active service and combat on the social identity of the draftees and volunteers who comprised the AEF. Reigning historiography has generally minimized the importance of those experiences as factors in the formation of distinct socio-cultural allegiances among American participants of the Great War. Instead, it has stressed the historical context of Progressive-Era reforms as the key to understanding the development of corporate identity among American soldiers in the years 1917 - 1919. This body of scholarship maintains that soldiers interpreted the meaning of their war service, and evaluated their relationship with each other and with the mainstream of American civil society, through the prism of the Progressive rhetoric of social engineering, national rejuvenation, and moral "uplift" to which they had been exposed from the moment of their induction. Exposure to the optimistic slogans of Progressive reform, coupled with the brevity of America's active involvement in the conflict, assured that American soldiers would emerge from the war with a heightened appreciation of American socio-political institutions, culture, and moral norms. This dissertation offers an alternative interpretation of the impact of the Great War on the collective and individual identities of its American participants. Using letters, diaries, and memoirs penned by enlisted soldiers and junior officers, it asserts the primacy of the war experience in shaping the socio-cultural allegiances of ordinary "Doughboys." Immersion in the organizational milieu of the military, followed by overseas deployment, active service in France, and combat on the Western Front, represented a radical break with civilian forms of identity soldiers professed prior to the war. It was the sum of these life-changing experiences, rather than the Progressive indoctrination they received in the training camps, that shaped soldiers' views of their relationship with each other and to the nation back home. Under the influence of these experiences, soldiers became members of an alternative social order whose values and worldviews frequently clashed with the attitudes and norms they associated with the American home front. Convinced they belonged to a closed community whose unique experiences had set them apart from the American mainstream, Doughboys emerged from the war with a collective mentality that dwelled on the fundamental differences, rather than the similarities, between those who had fought "over there" from those who remained "over here."</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: John C. Pettegrew.

This dissertation explores the nature of Indigenous influences on trade and diplomacy in proprietary South Carolina. While I was initially interested in the ways in which Indigenous slavery enriched proprietary Carolina and capitalized its commercial and imperial expansion, I was not willing to begin my investigation in AD 1670 because principle agents of this economic activity were members of Native societies, which had only a few generations prior to the establishment of Charles Town had lived under the hegemony of Mississippian mound centers and participated in Mississippian systems of governance, diplomacy, and exchange. As a result, this dissertation contextualizes Charles Town's commercial and diplomatic interactions with Native southeastern peoples from various Indigenous perspectives. Part One considers the long tradition of North American mound construction, emphasizing the Mississippian period, final epoch of moundbuilding, because Mississippian peoples encountered European explorers throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and interacted with Euro-American settler populations until the 1730s. Part Two attempts to demonstrate cultural, social and political continuity between Last Mississippian societies and historic southeastern tribal confederacies by critically considering the nature of Indigenous sociopolitical reorganization during the protohistoric period, embracing tribal traditions that openly celebrate connections to moundbuilding societies, and identifying Mississippian survivals in the sociopolitical institutions of Native southeastern peoples. Part Three demonstrates the utility of such broad methodological approaches, using Native history and culture as backdrops for examining, re-reading, and explicating the events of cross-cultural interaction during Carolina's proprietary period. By creating and nurturing a market for indigenous slaves, Charles Town merchants were able to profoundly affect the social, economic, and political reorganization of indigenous peoples throughout the region; however, the institutional parameters and practical logistics of southeastern cross-cultural interaction remained distinctly Indigenous in character. I argue that Charles Town's Indian slave economy was subsidized by Indigenous institutions, which, although modified from their Pre-Columbian character, retained numerous Mississippian qualities. By incorporating English traders and commodities into preexisting commercial and diplomatic networks, Native peoples subsidized Carolina's commercial expansion and imperial ascendancy both directly and indirectly, catapulting South Carolina into positions of economic and diplomatic prominence, in ways which have not been completely explored.